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mytrip writes "Senator Joe Biden (D-Del) has proposed an ambitious plan, costing on the order of $1 billion, aimed at curtailing illegal activities via P2P networks. His plan involves utilizing new software to monitor peer-to-peer traffic on an ongoing basis. 'At an afternoon Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing about child exploitation on the Internet, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) said he was under the impression it's "pretty easy to pick out the person engaged in either transmitting or downloading violent scenes of rape, molestation" simply by looking at file names. He urged use of those techniques by investigators to help nab the most egregious offenders."

Actually, he is technical enough, or was briefed by his tech-team enough, to mention that IP addresses arn't the only things used, and are only associated with the time stamp of when they were used, and they subpoena the ISP for the info of that IP address at the time it was used.

MAC addresses don't go past the first network equipment (usually your router or switch). As far as I know there are only two ways of seeing the original MAC address : encapsulate the Ethernet frames, or directly ask the number from the NIC driver. Both are currently impossible to do in a passive way (ie: network probe or traffic filtering). You need a layer 7 tool to do that.

I don't think it's enforceable to require every single computer to have such a software (just to many of them, and too many versions). That is without even mentioning networks such as Tor which would remove the informations from the payload anyway.

Wow. Another cry-baby communist bed-wetter so ANGRY about the ending of the cold war (the US won) and the prosperity of the 80s.

I think you have forgotten what that fuck-nut and terrorist sympathizer Carter did to the country with his social progressive experiments (hint hint, double digit inflation and unemployment). Oh, and the terrorist label is not propaganda. Hamas is a proud terrorist organization. Unless you consider the deliberate and intentional targeting of civilians to be just "freedom fighting".

I will do my best. Modern American politics all leads back to the Civil Rights bill in the 1960's. Once that was signed (by a democrat - he was quoted afterwards as saying that the Dems had lost the South for a generation, and they did), if you were against segregation, you were a Democrat. If you weren't, you were a Republican.

Ten years later, the feminist movement was in full swing, and Roe v. Wade (legalizing abortion) was decided. People who supported Civil Rights for blacks were also more likely to support feminist causes, and abortion is a feminist cause. Pro-choice activists naturally gravitated to the Democrats, further deepening the division between the two parties.

At the same time, the Vietnam war is coming to a close. Liberal anti-war activists gravitate Democrat, commie hating hawks gravitate towards the Republicans. This further reinforces the notion started by Eisenhower that Republicans are the party of the military. Republicans are more likely to go to war than Democrats, so they become the party of Big Business (remember that whole military industrial complex thing?).

At this point many people like to point out Hollywood's connection to the Dems. All I have to say at this point is that if Hollywood was in Texas instead of the liberal bastion of California you can bet that they would be associated with the Republicans.

Anyway, so what do we have today? Republicans consistently have a more refined and focused message, because the majority of their constituency is voting against something: against integration, against abortion rights, against communists, against appeasement. You'll notice that when Republicans need to get out their base, they will find something else to energize them against (see gay marriage in 2004, precipitous withdrawal in 2008). Big Business remains a part of this party because in order to take a stand against what they hate, this bloc will consistently vote against their own economic self-interest.

(There are a group of people who claim to vote Republican because they are "fiscal conservatives". I humbly submit that this bloc either does not know what this term means, or has not been paying attention for the last 30 years, and will leave it at that).

Who does that leave the Democrats with? Basically, everybody else - which is why their message is so unfocused and largely ineffective.

So, both sides boil it down to a choice between good and evil. Democrats are n****r-lovin' baby killers. Republicans are racist, sexist war mongers. Republicans are far more likely to pass laws and policies that cater to big business at the expense of the individual. Dems are far more likely to pass "wasteful" social programs that benefit their base.